After Aunt Sadie left on that day she’d spotted Giselle with the shovel, Thomas went outside to get a closer look.

He wished he’d put on his coat. It was always cold in mid-November in Michigan, but the wind that day had made it feel Christmas-cold. Hugging himself, Thomas thought of the warm kitchen and his mother, then decided he’d rather be out here. For a few minutes anyway.

Giselle had on a purple puffy jacket and hat and a pair of snow pants under her skirt. Thomas thought she looked like a purple-quilted marshmallow trying to dig a hole.

“I told you the other day…” Thomas raised his voice to get Giselle to stop digging and look up at him. “My mom doesn’t like dogs.” Thomas didn’t believe this. He’d only said it to make Giselle give up the idea.

“Thomas,” Giselle said in an exasperated parent-teachery way. “Your mom will love Frenchy. Quel chien adorable! What an adorable dog! Everyone says so. I’m telling you, my plan is perfect.”

“You can’t make a dog run away,” he told her, watching the steam from their breath twist together.

“Yes, you can.” Giselle’s pale cheeks were flushed red. “Well, I can,” she corrected herself. “Using various behavioral techniques.”

According to their mailbox conversations, Giselle planned to be a psychologist when she grew up. Her mother was a very good one with her own practice. Giselle was going to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

“Don’t look so worried, Thomas! It’s only for a little while. And you have a fenced yard. Tomorrow, before school, I’ll put Frenchy’s favorite treats on your side of the fence and he will crawl into your yard using this tunnel I’m making—I’ll block him from returning with our trash can lid. Your dad will be at work, you and I will go to school, and your mom will be the only one to see him running around, and then…”

Gazing up at the gray sky, Giselle continued to imagine how it would all go.

Even with the fence between them, Thomas could see quite clearly the long fringe that framed her brown eyes. No, they had green, too, Thomas noticed. Like a cat’s eyes.

But a cat’s face was serious; Giselle had a round face, and her mouth was never still. If she wasn’t talking, which was rare, she was laughing or smiling or humming a tune or biting her lip. Taking her whole face into consideration, Thomas thought it safe to say that Giselle considered the world to be—more than 50 percent of the time at least—a laughing matter.

“Frenchy will cover her with kisses and she will carry him inside and give him something to eat and they’ll snuggle.” Giselle stuck her arm through the fence to grab Thomas’s arm, but she couldn’t catch hold with her mittens. “Did you know that just petting an animal releases oxytocin into your bloodstream? Those are the same feel-good hormones you get from hugging your friends or when a mother nurses her baby…”

Giselle’s voice had trailed off. It seemed to Thomas that she’d released some feel-good hormones just thinking about her wonderful plan, but he hoped she wouldn’t mention anything about babies to his mother.

Then Giselle said, “Voilà! Raison d’être. That means, ‘reason to be.’ She will have rescued poor lost little Frenchy and will feel better. Now, no more talking. I need to dig.”

The problem with Giselle, his father would say, was that she believed in the outcomes she imagined when, in truth, she had no idea what would happen. It was very foolish to believe in things that did not exist, according to Thomas’s father. Stick to what is known and observable. Always have proof.

Somehow Thomas knew that if he said this to Giselle, she would laugh.